No Going Back

January 25 - February 29, 2008
Opening / Friday, January 25 / 6-8 pm
Artist Talk / Saturday, January 26, 11 am


Solomon Projects is pleased to present No Going Back, an exhibition of new oil paintings by Leslie Wayne. No Going Back will be on view January 25th through February 29th with an opening reception with the artist present on Friday, January 25th from 6 to 8 PM. An artist talk will take place on Saturday, January 26th at 11am.

No Going Back marks a significant increase in scale in the artist's paintings. Her work has evolved from a commitment to abstraction as a general language of transcendence compressed into a tiny format, to a specific acknowledgement of her roots as a landscape painter from California where she grew up. Reinforced by her recent involvement with an ocean conservation group, she has developed a body of work that focuses on expanding the very nature of landscape painting. In Wayne's words, "I'm interested in creating a secular and contemporary answer to the 19th Century romantic landscape painters by creating a visual experience that is analogous to being in nature, rather than a mediated image of nature".

Wayne's dense layers of slowly-applied oil paint, which she pushes and shapes into sculptural ribbons or "strata" of undulating color, break from the traditional rectangular picture plane of her earlier works by virtually drooping and collapsing under the pressure of their own weight, as if they were about to slide right off the bottom of their support. Her color palette is dominated by brilliant blues, rich reds, tangerine and lustrous green hues, with titles that demonstrate her abiding interest in nature and the environment, like Before the Quake and Unseasonable.

Leslie Wayne received the prestigious 2006 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting. Her work has been exhibited in major museum exhibitions both nationally and internationally and may be found in the permanent collections of the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Fondation Cartier, Paris; Colleczion Thyssen Bornemisza, Madrid; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; and La Coleccion Jumex, Mexico City, among others. Wayne received her BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York City, where she has lived and worked since 1982. This will be her third solo exhibition at the gallery.